On using the F Word

Jonah Goldberg points out that I shouldn't use Fascism to describe our out of control Federal state.  Not because it's not true, but because in America the term is not understood properly.  So I won't..  Even though they are.

Basically, the answer is that Liberal Fascism was a failure in at least one regard. It was never my intent to make abuse of the F-word a bipartisan affair. The idea was simply that the Left should stop using the word because they don't know what they're talking about and they're looking in the wrong direction in their eternal vigilance for fascism. Conservatism in the Anglo-American tradition has no basis in, or relation to, European fascism. And it is not just slanderous but hypocritical for liberals to hurl the term at conservatives when the fact is American progressivism does share DNA with European fascism. But that doesn't mean we should go around calling liberals fascists.

We shouldn't do it because it's rarely true or appropriate, but we also shouldn't do it because most Americans are sufficiently ignorant about the nature of fascism to make conservatives hurling the term sound crazy or extreme. It's counterproductive. The irony for me is that my critics on the left insist that the whole point of the book was to call liberals fascists. It really wasn't, which is why it failed in at least one regard. 

So, yes, I could absolutely have written today's column about the similarities between Obama's fantasy of a militarized America and fascist doctrine (Mussolini described the exact same thing as the "socialism of the trenches"!). But, as George H.W. Bush used to say, that wouldn't be prudent. And prudence, unlike fascism, is at the heart of conservatism.